Too much happiness_ stories - Alice Munro [91]
The jacket I had on was too light for evening wear, or maybe it was colder here, the wind stronger, than in Toronto.
The building might well be locked at this time, locked and empty.
The grand front doors appeared to be so. I did not even bother to climb the steps to try them, because I decided to follow a couple of old women—old like me—who had just come up the long flight from the street and who bypassed those steps entirely, heading around to an easier entrance at the side of the building.
There were more people inside, maybe two or three dozen people, but there wasn’t a sense that they were gathered for a service. They were scattered here and there in the pews, some kneeling and some chatting. The women ahead of me dipped their hands in a marble font without looking at what they were doing and said hello—hardly lowering their voices—to a man who was setting out baskets on a table.
“It looks a lot warmer out than it is,” said one of them, and the man said the wind would bite your nose off.
I recognized the confessionals. Like separate small cottages or large playhouses in a Gothic style, with a lot of dark wooden carving, dark brown curtains. Elsewhere all was glowing, dazzling. The high curved ceiling most celestially blue, the lower curves of the ceiling—those that joined the upright walls—decorated with holy images on gold-painted medallions. Stained-glass windows hit by the sun at this time of day were turned into columns of jewels. I made my way discreetly down one aisle, trying to get a look at the altar, but the chancel being in the western wall was too bright for me to look into. Above the windows, though, I saw that there were painted angels. Flocks of angels, all fresh and gauzy and pure as light.
It was a most insistent place but nobody seemed to be overwhelmed by all the insistence. The chatting ladies kept chatting softly but not in whispers. And other people after some businesslike nodding and crossing knelt down and went about their routines.
As I ought to be going about mine. I looked around for a priest but there was not one in sight. Priests as well as other people must have a working day. They must drive home and go into their living rooms or offices or dens and turn on the television and loosen their collars. Fetch a drink and wonder if they were going to get anything decent for supper. When they did come into the church they would come officially. In their vestments, ready to perform some ceremony. Mass?
Or to hear confessions. But then you would never know when they were there. Didn’t they enter and leave their grilled stalls by a private door?
I would have to ask somebody. The man who had distributed the baskets seemed to be here for reasons that were not purely private, though he was apparently not an usher. Nobody needed an usher. People chose where they wanted to sit—or kneel—and sometimes decided to get up and choose another spot, perhaps being bothered by the glare of the jewel-inflaming sun. When I spoke to him I whispered, out of old habit in a church—and he had to ask me to speak again. Puzzled or embarrassed, he nodded in a wobbly way towards one of the confessionals. I had to become very specific and convincing.
“No, no. I just want to talk to a priest. I’ve been sent to talk to a priest. A priest called Father Hofstrader.”
The basket man disappeared down the more distant side aisle and came back in a little while with a briskly moving stout young priest in ordinary black costume.
He motioned me into a room I had not noticed—not a room, actually, we went through an archway, not a doorway—at the back of the church.
“Give us a chance to talk, in here,” he said, and pulled out a chair for me.
“Father Hofstrader—”
“Oh no, I must tell you, I am not Father Hofstrader. Father Hofstrader is not here. He is on vacation.”
For a moment I did not know how to proceed.
“I will do my best to help you.”
“There is a woman,” I said, “a woman who is dying in Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto—”
“Yes, yes. We know of Princess